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THEO RY AND

HIST O R Y

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M IVE
A
Y ETHAN KLEINBERG
20
18 JOAN WALLACH SCOTT
GARY WILDER
PROLOGUE:
DEDICATED
TO CLIO,
MUSE
OF Sing Clio, daughter of Zeus, Theory’s rage
HISTORY at the violations of your charge.
You, who told Hesiod,
“we know how to speak false things that seem true,
but we know when we will, to utter true things.”
Now is the time to utter true things, for
Theory has been dishonored in your house,
displaced by empires of empiricism,
fetishism of archives, dictates of discipline,
enforcement of orthodoxy, and impotent story-telling.
Without Theory, History is naught but tales,
told by victors and moralists, signifying
nothing beyond themselves.
Without Theory, the operations of power
and sources of injustice remain mystified,
impenetrable to us mortals.
Our observations, when limited to description,
ill-equip us for the critical thought we so
desperately need, even to analyze those repositories
of memory that are your charge.
O Clio, we enlist your ear.
Listen, please, to our voices of rage.
With these theses on Theory and History we invite you
to sanctify our mission and to commend us
to the gods.
DIS O
CIP N TH
LIN E L
AR IMI
Y H TS
IST OF
OR
Y I.1 Academic history has
never managed to transcend
its eighteenth century origins
as an empiricist enterprise. By this we mean not David Hume’s
earlier skeptical approach but the scientistic method intrinsi-
cally inked to positivism, which Horkheimer called “modern
empiricism” that was later adopted across the human sciences.
Academic history remains dedicated to this method of gath-
ering facts in order to produce interpretations by referring
them to supposedly given contexts and organizing them into
chronological narratives.
I.2 Actually existing academic history promotes a disciplinary
essentialism founded upon a methodological fetishism. Treating
reified appearances (i.e. immediately observable, preferably archival,
evidence) as embodying the real and containing the truth of social
relations, it evaluates scholarship based on whether this empiricist
method has been capably employed. The field tends to produce
scholars rather than thinkers, and regards scholars in technocratic
terms. Historians typically write for other professional historians,
paying special attention to the disciplinary norms and gatekeepers
upon which career advancement depends. This guild mentality
fosters an ethos of specialized “experts,” workmen who instru-
mentally employ their “expertise” as proof of membership and
performance of status.
I.3 The current obsession with “methodology” is premised on this
“workman like” approach; the odos or path to historical knowl-
edge is assumed to be singular and those who stray from it are
considered lost. This methodological emphasis narrows the disci-
plinary path of history, blinding researchers and readers to other
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 possible routes to the past. In contrast, training in theory lays bare
the logic, pitfalls, and advantages behind the choice of any one
path.
I.4 Lying behind this fetishism of method is an unquestioned alle-
giance to “ontological realism.” Central to this epistemology is a
commitment to empirical data that serves as a false floor to hold up
the assertion that past events are objectively available for discov-
ery, description, and interpretation. Here the tautology is exposed:
empiricist methodology enables the rule of this realism while this
realism guarantees the success of empiricist methodology.
I.5 History, as a field, encourages a system of discipline or punish
Those whose positions appear to be cutting-edge but hedge their
bets and organize their thought around common convention are
rewarded, while those who strike out for new territories are
condemned. By “new territories” we mean alternative epistemo-
logical inquiries, orientations, or starting points, not new themes
or topics. The disciplined are rewarded by the guild while the
innovators are punished. Nowhere is this disciplining process
more apparent than in the review and publication process of the
American Historical Association’s flagship journal. The disciplining
occurs via the practice of multiple anonymous reviewers policing
their disciplinary turf and then congratulating themselves and their
authors for their scientific objectivity and resultant meritocracy.
The stultifying effect of the process leads to articles that may be
broad in terms of geographic and even thematic reach but are
stunningly homogenous in terms of their theoretical and method-
ological approach. Employing large numbers of reviewers creates
a veneer of democratic meritocracy while affording even more
power to editors then able to select among the many opinions as
to what should be allowed to pass. This inevitably leads authors to
smooth out their arguments and pull back their claims in an effort
to appease the widest possible audience and produce the minimum
amount of offense. Only that which is already familiar typically
finds its way into the pages of the journal. This and other disciplinary
journals typically work to reproduce what counts as professional
commonsense, reaffirm guild solidarity, and reproduce boundaries
between insiders and outsiders.
2 3
I.6 The editor of the AHR has recently announced a plan to “decolo-
nize” the journal — to correct “decades of exclusionary practice,
during which women, people of color, immigrants, and colonized
and indigenous people were effectively silenced as producers of
scholarship and subjects of historical study.” It promises to do so
by diversifying the board of editors, the authors of books reviewed,
and the choice of reviewers. It also pledges to solicit articles from
a more diverse group of scholars. These are welcome and overdue
reforms. But he also notes that “procedures for evaluating article
submissions” will not be revised because the existing “process of
blind peer review” is already “highly democratic.” By focusing
primarily on the provinces and colonies of the reviews section,
the editors thus concede that the primary articles will remain
firmly under imperial rule. The editor does not acknowledge that
decolonizing the journal must also include rethinking the scholarly
norms and forms of knowledge that have enabled the kind of
exclusions in which the AHR has long participated. By focusing
exclusively on sociologically diverse authors and geographically
diverse topics, empiricist methodology and realist epistemology
will remain in place as the unquestioned disciplinary ground. Once
again, existing hegemony is maintained by a nominal pledge to
diversity which aims to co-opt rather than transform. The field and
the journal can only really be decolonized by radically reimagining
the use and applicability of theory for history.
I.7 Given that historians analyze (the dynamic and changing char-
acter of) social formations, relations, experiences, and meanings
they cannot do without a solid grasp of critical theory (whether
it be semiotic, psychoanalytic, Marxist, hermeneutic, phenome-
nological, structuralist, poststructuralist, feminist, postcolonial,
queer etc.) as well as an understanding of the history of historical
knowledge and the theory of history (theories underpinning his-
torical analysis). Only then can we transcend the false opposition
between history and theory by producing theoretically grounded
history and historically grounded theory. Few history departments
have any faculty dedicated to the theory of history or critical the-
ory and instead rely on occasional courses from members with an
interest in the field or those few figures outside of their depart-
ments to whom they send their students. This demotes “theory”
as peripheral to the “real” work of history but also disciplines the
 students to think of theory as a supplementary exercise that is not
integral to historical thinking and writing.
I.8 History’s normal (and normalizing) approach to doctoral training
reveals (and reinforces) its anti-theoretical and unreflexive ori-
entation. Core components usually entail historiography courses
and research seminars. The former typically focus on assembling
a corpus of significant works in a specific subfield which students
read for information (learning the master narratives), time-place-
topic mastery (which will be tested in comprehensive exams), and
technique (the more or less successful deployment of norma-
tive historical methodologies, which can be used or modified in
students’ own research). Doctoral research seminars typically
charge incoming students with writing publishable essays based
on primary source materials, as if “doing history” is a self-evident
technical undertaking and students need simply to develop the
methodological habit of gathering factual evidence to be contextu-
alized and narrated. Although thematic and theoretical courses (of
the gender — or fill in the blank — for historians model) are avail-
able, it is rare for history doctoral students to be required to study
the history of “history” as a form of knowledge, the epistemology
of the human sciences, or critical theory.
methodology are usually consigned to  —  ghettoized within — 
“intellectual” history which often relates ideas to society in ways
that confirm rather than displace the conventional assumptions
of the discipline. In and of itself, intellectual history is no more
likely to raise reflexive questions about historical epistemolo-
gy and historiographic norms than other professional subfields.
Intellectual historians of heterodox thinking (e.g. poststructural-
ism, psychoanalysis, Marxism) describe the ideas, but rarely use
those theories as starting points, methods, or frameworks for their
own historical analysis.
I.11 History’s anti-theoretical preoccupation with empirical facts and
realist argument nevertheless entails a set of uninterrogated
theoretical assumptions about time and place, intention and
agency, proximity and causality, context and chronology. These
work, however unwittingly, to reinforce the scholarly and political
status quo.

I.9 Disciplinary history usually brackets reflection on its own condi-

tions of possibility: i.e., on what counts as evidence, how methods
may prefigure how such evidence may make arguments legible
and valid, how such validity implies assumptions about social or-
der and historical transformation; on the relation between social
forms and forms of knowledge, accepted ways of relating and
acceptable ways of knowing, normative orders and normalizing
concepts; on the socio-political fields that inevitably shape and
thus over-determine historians’ intellectual, professional, and in-
stitutional orientations, priorities, and hierarchies. These norms of
training and publishing reinforce disciplinary history’s tendency to
artificially separate data from theory, facts from concepts, research
from thinking. This leads “theory” to be reified as a set of ready-
made frameworks that can be “applied” to data.

I.10 Theoretical frameworks and concepts that do not comport

with disciplinary history’s realist epistemology and empiricist

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 II.5 Recuperation, a variation on thematizing. A gestural inclusion
ON that seems to welcome theory (usually offered in the preface or
TH introduction or footnotes to an empirical study), only to ignore its
ER implications in the work that follows. So deconstruction becomes
ES
TO ISTA
a synonym for interpretation in conventional intellectual histories,
TH NC Marxism is reduced to economic determinism or the application
EO E of “class” to local community studies, and “gender” replicates
History’s resistance to theory RY the sex/gender distinction or the fixity of the m/f opposition in the
has taken many forms: same way everywhere it is said to occur.

II.1 An invidious distinction between a feminized philosophy and a
masculinized history. So, philosophy is mocked as a frivolous
dance with “Fancy French theory,” while history is praised for its
solid hard work. Remember that image of the real historian slog-
ging up the 100 steps of the archives in Lyon (as so many penitent
pilgrims before her) to search for facts. Philosophy is denounced
as speculative (f); history revered as objective (m). The “noble
dream” of a pure science (m) has never left the discipline: once
moldy rye was offered to explain French revolutionary fervor,
today historical “science” takes the form of DNA tests on ancient
bones or the application of neuroscience to mentalités.
II.2 The naturalizing of history as something out there, waiting to be
unearthed; the recovery of the dead as a sure way to know the
living. History as the story that tells us; rather than the story we
tell about ourselves.
II.6 The dismissal of theory i. In this case structuralist or poststructural-
ist theory as dangerous relativism: by interrogating the relationship
of language to reality, theory is said to compromise the necessary
search for truths taken to be self-evident.
II.7 The dismissal of theory ii. The charge that theory — any theory
— involves the distorting imposition of fixed ideological categories
on self-evident facts. Like the endorsement by some literary schol-
ars of “surface reading,” this charge of distortion is contradicted
by the unproblematic recourse of these scholars (historians and
literary scholars alike) to so-called objective analytic categories:
class, race, gender, and psychoanalytic diagnostics (Oedipus com-
plex, family romance, etc etc).
II.8 Disregard for the vagaries of language and an insistence instead
on the literal (“common sense”) meaning of words.

II.3 Thematizing i. Theory as one more turn (a wrong one) in the ever-
turning kaleidoscope of historical investigation. The lure of theory
is taken to be an aberrant stage in the intellectual history of the
discipline, happily outgrown, replaced by a return to more solidly
grounded observation.

II.4 Thematizing ii. The objects of theoretical investigation are them

selves thematized. So, for example, Foucault’s radical episte-
mological investigations become just another empirical study of
prisons or clinics or sexual practices. And “my” prison’s differ-
ences from Foucault’s become a demonstration of the error of his
theoretical ways.

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RY
E ORY HISTO
H L
ON T RITICA
C
AND
III.1 Critical history is theorized history.
It does not treat “theory” as an isolated corpus of texts or body of
knowledge. Nor does it treat theory as a separate, non-histori-
cal form, of knowledge. Rather, it regards theory as a worldly
practice (and historical artifact). The point is not for historians to
become theorists; theory for theory’s sake is as bankrupt as the idea
that facts can “speak for themselves.” The point is for disciplinary
history to overcome its guild mentality (disciplinary essentialism)
and empiricist methodology (methodological fetishism) — to
interrogate its “commonsense” assumptions about evidence and
reality, subjectivity and agency, context and causality, chronology
and temporality. This would require serious engagement with crit-
ical theories of self, society, and history.
III.2 Critical history does not apply theory to history or call for more
theory to be integrated into historical works as if from the outside.
Rather, it aims to produce theoretically informed history and his-
torically grounded theory. Critical history takes non-contiguous,
non-proximate arrangements, processes, and forces seriously be
they social, symbolic, or psychic structures; fields and relations;
or “causes” that may be separated from “effects” by continents or
centuries. Critical history reflects on its own conditions of social
and historical possibility. It specifies the theoretical assumptions,
orientations, and implications of its claims. It elaborates the worldly
stakes of its intervention.
III.3 Critical history questions and historicizes the realist epistemology
underlying both historical empiricism and philosophical rationa-
ism. It recognizes that inductive history is merely the flip-side of
the deductive philosophy that professional history, from its incep-
tion, opposed. Each, however differently, separates being from
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knowing, world from thought, truth from hitory. Neither question
the underlying relation between social reality and the (socially pro-
duced, historically specific) frameworks, categories, methods, and
epistemologies through which to understand that reality (whether
inductively or deductively). Critical history points beyond the false
opposition between empiricist induction and rationalist deduction,
and historicist description and transhistorical abstraction.
III.4 Critical history recognizes all “facts” as always already mediated,
categories as social, and concepts as historical; theory is worldly
and concepts do worldly work. So long as “facts” are equated with
“truth,” historians employ a logical contradiction because both
the inductive and deductive logic deployed imply a permanent
unchanging concept of “truth” that is antithetical to the premis-
es of even the most conservative notions of history: change over
time. Training in theory and critical history allows historians to
recognize such a contradiction. This then forces them to confront
the way that what constitute the “facts” in an historical argument
are bound up with the social conditions, the circumstances of the
historian, and the range of acceptable questions asked of the past
at any given moment in time.
III.5 Critical history recognizes that every reference to context (as in-
dex of meaning) is itself an argument about social relations and
arrangements that cannot be presumed and should be elaborated.
Context is never solely given nor self-evident; context always begs
as many questions as it may seem to resolve.
III.6 Critical historians are self-reflexive; they recognize that they are
psychically, epistemologically, ethically, and politically implicated
in their objects of study:
a. psychically, historians should acknowledge and try to work
through, rather than simply act out, their unconscious in-
vestments in their material;
b. epistemologically, there may be deep structural relations
between the (socially produced) analytic concepts, frame-
works, and methods used by historians and the social
world being analyzed; every work of history implies or
 promotes a particular understanding of social relations and
historical transformation;
c. ethically, historians bear a responsibility toward — are in
some way answerable to — the actors and ideas, as well as
their legacies and afterlives, being analyzed;
d. politically, works of history are worldly acts that affirm
or question commonsense understandings and existing ar-
rangements, address social contradictions and engage with
ongoing struggles implicitly or explicitly.
III.7 Critical history is a history of the present that links past to present
dynamically, recognizes both the persisting or repeating character
of the past in the present and the non-necessary character of pasts
present and presents past — whether through lines of genealogical
descent, uncanny returns, haunting traces and spectral forces, or
nonsynchronous contradictions within an untimely now.
III.8 Critical history seeks not only to account for, and thereby denat-
uralize, actually existing arrangements. It seeks to challenge the
very logic of past and present, now and then, here and there, us and
them upon which both disciplinary history and the actual social
order largely depend.
III.9 Critical history seeks to intervene in public debates and political
struggles. But rather than seek to collaborate with power as special-
ized experts, it questions the reduction of thinking to scholarship,
scholars to specialization, and the very idea of the rule of experts.
III.10 Critical history aims to understand the existing world in order
to question the givens of our present so as to create openings for
other possible worlds.
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CODA: T
HE NAVE
THE DRE L OF
AM
If we think of the historian as akin to the interpreter of dreams,
we see that those who look to make literal sense of the dream by
presenting it in a chronological, realist, and self-evident manner,
are recognized and rewarded. But those whose inquiries lead to
the obscure navel of the dream, the place where narratives and
interpretation stop making conventional sense, are ignored or
dismissed. The danger of a guild so highly disciplined is that the
organization of meaning only allows for a narrow band of interpre-
tation that is always aligned with what has come before, with what
already “makes sense” (i.e. common sense). Structures of tempo-
rality, politics, or even identity that do not conform with convention
are ruled out or never seen at all. The historian equipped with a
background in theory is attuned to the navel of the dream, to the
places where history does and does not “make sense,” and this is
the opening to interpretative and political innovation.
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